Prelimary processing for M27 Image
Finally took a few minutes to do something with the images I took during the Summer Star Party. This is an LRGB composite of a single frame of each color for M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. We’re talking only about 2 minutes (or less!) exposure per color here. I need to take the time to combine …
Painful Drupal 7 Migration
I’ve avoided this for a long time. Finally I launched into it to find what it would take. You’ll notice the web site looks a bit different. That’s mostly because I didn’t try to migrate the old theme; I’ll eventually go through and tweak things until it morphs back into something closer. But that’s not …
M27: The Dumbell Nebula, Take 2
A few years ago, I took a image of this and didn’t even record what I used. Recently, I’ve been playing around with new equipment, in particular an AstroTech 6″ Ritchie-Chretien that hasn’t seem much use since I bought it. This particular scope really needs a bigger imager than my little Meade DSI Pro II, …
Transit of Venus 2012, Clouded out in Brooklyn
A couple of dozen folks showed up in Shore Road Park hoping to get a peek at Venus transiting the Sun today, but the weather did not cooperate. After setting up shortly after 5pm, I had to cover the equipment due to some light rain which passed through. Eventually the Sun peeked through a thin …
How Fast is Sound?
A few months ago, I read an article in The Physics Teacher (published by the American Association of Physics Teachers) on measuring the speed of sound using a couple of microphones hooked up to a computer’s line-in jack. Apart from having to make a trip to Radio Shack to buy some parts to convert two standard unpowered microphones into a pair of powered microphones for stereo input, the process was amazingly straightforward. I did a quick proof-of-concept in the dining room one evening and go
Changing UID/GID on Mac OS X 10.5
Okay, this is not an astronomy topic, but I got stumped on this for a long time and searching the web, while helpful, didn’t make it exactly obvious. Why would you even want to change GID or UID? Well, I needed to synchronize UID and GID with my NFS server for file sharing. We have …
PS 102 TV Turnoff Week Stargazing Second Showing!
This was originally supposed to be the rain date for the April 12th event, but there was enough interest in having a second event that we’ve decide to turn the rain date into a second showing.
Again, this is weather permitting. The location is the same, near the middle of the ball fields in Shore Road Park near 76th Street. The closest entrance is the ramp at 75th Street.
If the weather is clear, we’ll be looking at the (nearly) full moon, Saturn, and with a little luck, the Beehive Cluster in Cancer (the Crab). See this page for the map to the event location.
NB: If you come in the 79th Street entrance near the playground, walk north to find us.
Stop the World I Want to Get Off!
Around the Earth in 24 hours Now that we know how to estimate the circumference of a circle from its radius we can go back to what we really want to know, if we travel around the earth in 24 hours, how far do we go and how fast? Okay, get out your calculators (or …
Session 1B: The March Sky
There are two goals here. First, to help you know what you can find in the night sky during the next few weeks. Second, to help to find your way around the night sky so you know how to find those things. Its All Angles When astronomers measure positions on the night sky, they use …
Lunar Eclipse Visible!
[img_assist|nid=689|title=2008-02-20 Lunar Eclipse|desc=|link=node|align=undefined|width=640|height=640] Starting around 2 pm EST, the clouds rolled in and it didn’t look good for viewing. But around 8:30 pm the clouds thinned allowing a fuzzy moon to be visible through and between the clouds so we could see the eclipse begin. By 10 pm, the skies had completely cleared an we …